Dark Side Bright Side is a progressive metal band founded by guitarist and composer Marco Gennaro during the end of winter 2019.
After more than a year dedicated just to the composition and arrangement of his debut album, in January 2021 singer and producer Enrico Tiberi joined the project. At the moment the two musicians are the only fixed members of the band. In Summer 2021 Adam Janzi from the band Vola was involved to record the drums for the entire album. In the project are also included Fabrizio Consoli aka Mancus Tattoo who designed the cover art of the album, and photographer/videographer Giuseppe D’Addurno, who shot the video of Nautilus.
The music of Dark Side Bright Side can be seen as a mixture of modern progressive metal, djent and grunge, containing elements of modern jazz, fusion and electronic music. Bands like Karnivool, Periphery, The Contorsionist, Animal as Leaders, Plini, Mastodon have been a big influence during the whole album production process.
Dark Side Bright Side was born from the need of Marco Gennaro to depict in music themes like existence and mortality.
His inspiration was the illness of his mother, who went under a heavy chemotherapy treatment for 3 years, culminating unfortunately with her death.
The result of Marco Gennaro’s efforts is a concept album divided in two blocks.
The first one is centred on the creation of life and the depiction of various and peculiar ways of surviving of some forms of life in our world. Like the Nautilus, a living fossil, who managed to keep unchanged its biological system for millenia by living in solitude in the depths of the oceans; or the olive tree who defeats death by dividing its trunk, once empty and dry, into smaller branches, which will continue to live on.
The second block takes direct inspiration from the illness of his mother, the cancer, the realization of the existence of death and the grief. A philosophical concept, like the proprioception, our ability to perceive our physical world, has been used as a synonym of our ability to perceive our existence and at the same time to understand death.
Impressive and thriving ecosystems living in earth sinkholes, called Cenotes, are compared to the memories of a loved one who left us, laying in hidden and safe places of our mind.
Each track was composed and arranged following fictional stories, which can be seen as some kind of movie plot; thus making the whole album eligible for a film score.